Description
Modern Ekphrasis explores the analogical relations between modern poetry and
painting in ekphrasis from Horace s mimetic ut pictura poesis tradition to Lessing s

temporal/spatial antithesis, and the analogy s post-modern deconstruction with
Derrida. The genesis of ekphrasis is demonstrated by close analytical readings of
modern poems by Howard Nemerov, W.C. Williams, Sylvia Plath, and John Ashbery,
mostly written on modern paintings by Paul Klee, Charles Demuth, Giorgio de Chirico,
and Frank Stella. In an innovative approach, the author applies Anton Ehrenzweig s
concept of unconscious scanning to a syncretic visualisation of Klee s Mountain Flora.
Viewed with an undifferentiated depth vision that can fix the figure and background in
a single glance, Mountain Flora acquires deeper verisimilitude. The self-reflexivity of
the poems which comments on their creative processes and the interrelations of
ekphrasis with cognition are analysed after the critical writings of Freud, Panowsky,
Gombrich, Hagstrum, Arnheim, Steiner, Ehrenzweig, Derrida, and in the light of the
latest neuroscientific discoveries. Homer s shield, Swift s tree, W.C. Williams pot of
flowers, and Ashbery s canvas create a suture within the ekphrastic poem in our
imagination. This book demonstrates the evolution of literature and the humanities in
our society from classicism to post-modernism which counteracted the self-alienation
caused by our modern communication technology by inventing new socio-artistic
circuits and new social identities.